adventures in the kin trade

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Essex

I will get round to the old ladies of Roe’s Buildings eventually but my interest in the push and pull of migration prompted an investigation of their 13-year-old servant, Lucy COOK. I tumbled into a genealogical rabbit hole.

Here she is in Filey in 1841, the census enumerator giving her an ‘N’ for No; she wasn’t born in Yorkshire. Ten years later she is a married woman with two children, living just around the corner from Roe’s Buildings. She gives her birthplace as Maldon Basin, Essex. Her husband, Robert CHEW, was a butcher and in 1861 she is with him in and five of their children at The Butcher’s Shop, 4 King Street. (A sixth child, Ann Elizabeth the Second, was with paternal grandmother Ann née HICK on census night.) Lucy gives her birthplace now as Heybridge, near Maldon in Essex. I suffer from poor short-term memory but Heybridge rang a bell. Within a few minutes, I realised I’d put a photograph of a headstone on FamilySearch Tree that remembered Lucy’s sister Elizabeth.

An hour or two later I had brought together Lucy’s entire birth family. Father Michael, mother Susanna, brothers John and William, sisters Ann, Elizabeth and Susannah. They are not found together in Filey Genealogy and Connections or on FamilySearchTree.

In my Roots Magic version of Kath’s database, Lucy is masquerading under a false name.

Her “real family” is incomplete.

Most of Lucy’s children have been picked up by the FamilySearch system. Yesterday morning the parents had about nine IDs each. I did the necessary merges (and gave Just Lucy her family name), but she is still from a broken home on FST.

I would like to put Lucy with her parents and siblings on FST but I’m waiting for the blessing of descendants/other contributors before doing so. Michael and Susanna didn’t baptise a daughter called Lucy.

So, Michael and Susanna’s last child, Susannah, was born in 1838. About three years later she was living in Church Street, Filey, 200 miles north of her birthplace, with widowed mother, brother John and eldest sister Elizabeth. Lucy is a stone’s throw away at Roe’s buildings and Ann, not found in 1841 in Filey, is a servant to Christiana LORRIMAN, mother of her uncle Richard, ten years later.